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A STUDY GUIDE FOR EURIPIDES’ HECUBA
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BY
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JAMES T. SVENDSEN
I BACKGROUNDS
MYTHIC:
“The survival into captive slavery of Hecuba, queen of Troy, her further misery in seeing
or learning the cruel deaths or slavery of all her family, and her own grotesque end,
transformed into a bitch, were perhaps all unvarying facts of myth; they became so after
Euripides. The poet inherited from the Epic, Lyric and perhaps earlier Tragic traditions
differing accounts of Polyxena’s death, including her sacrifice to honour Achilles; but the
emphasis in Hecuba on the girl’s willingness to die seems to be his innovation, like the
particular role of Polydorus; and he appears to have invented Polydorus’ murderous
host Polymestor for himself. Euripides’ conception of the play, bringing together in their
remarkable effect on a previously broken and passive Hecuba the two successive
deaths of her two children, had caused, it seems, another innovation: the setting in the
Thracian Chersonese. The setting in Thrace stands together with the invention of
Polymestor; he can be as freely barbarous as Euripides’ theatrical imagination requires.”
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C. Collard
HISTORICAL:
“Hecuba dates from the 420’s, from the first decade of the great Peloponnesian War
between Athens and Sparta and their various adherents - the war recognized by its
participants as unprecedented in scale and importance, a war whose course and
conduct seemed to many of them to imperil almost everything that was fixed in
standards of behavior. Hecuba is a product of the war’s uncertainties. It is tragic in its
view of Hecuba suffering from the inescapable consequences of Paris’ Judgment and
from man’s selfish and unpredictable cruelty; it is more unsettling for its audience in
what those consequences and that cruelty provoke in Hecuba, her revenge, than it is
reassuring about nobility and resilience amid such tragedy.! !
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C. Collard
DRAMATIC:
“ Hecuba was first performed in about 424 BCE, some ten years before Women of Troy.
It comes at the mid-point of Euripides’ career, in his most prolific period. Like Women of
Troy, it has nothing in common with the kind of tragedy described by Aristotle. It belongs
to another group ignored by him: plays which explore the character of an individual
driven to extreme behavior by great suffering.... The style of Hecuba is remarkably
rhetorical. It manner is almost as self-conscious as that of (say) Racine’s Britannicus,
and there is a large amount of music and distracted song. Dons down the ages have
complained that Hecuba is broken-backed, that it is artistically incompetent to write a
first half in which your central figure is all grief and a second half in which she is all rage.
This may appear to be the case in the study, but in the theatre -as in real life - it can
seem an entirely plausible way for someone of this character, in these circumstances, to
behave. Apparent oddity, in fact, both mirrors human experience and ‘makes’ the play.”
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Kenneth Macleish
II PLOT SUMMARY
“Troy has fallen to the Greeks, Hecuba and the other captured women have started their
journey to Greece and have paused in the land of Thrace, where Polymestor rules.
There Polydorus, Hecuba’s youngest son, has been sent for safety but was murdered
by Polymestor as soon as he heard the news of Troy’s fall. Polydorus’ ghost speaks the
prologue. The chorus inform Hecuba that the Greeks are considering, whether to
sacrifice her daughter Polyxena as an offering to the dead Achilles. Odysseus and
Hecuba debate the fate of her daughter, Polyxena entering to say that she will die gladly
rather than endure the life of a slave. Talthybios, the herald of the Greeks, describes
how she died nobly, and Hecuba asks that she be allowed to give Polyxena a proper
burial. A servant girl brings in the body of Polydorus which they have found floating in
the sea, and, her grief now doubled, Hecuba asks Agamemnon to allow her to take
revenge on Polymestor. Polymestor and his two sons are enticed into the women’s tent,
where he is blinded and his sons murdered. Agamemnon judges a final debate between
Polymestor and Hecuba and finds for Hecuba. Polymestor predicts the imminent
demise of Hecuba as Odysseus’ ship returns to Greece.” ! !
Storey & Allen
The plot thus can be viewed as a 1) bipartite action with the tragic death of Polyxena
followed by the Hecuba’s successful revenge on Polydorus; 2) a tripartite action
focusing on Hecuba’s three debates with Odysseus, Agamemnon and Polydorus; and 3)
an action alternating scenes in iambics (e.g. monologues and debates) with musical
scenes (arias, duets and choral odes).
III CHARACTER:
“And what of Hecuba herself? This is one of the great roles of Greek tragedy. She
enters supported by her women, and she faints, falling to the ground on her back. Yes it
becomes increasingly hard to think of her as a victim. It is not simply because she can
talk with such intellectual reach and energy. She can even find some comfort in
Polyxena’s courage.In fact the first part of the play may have led us to believe that she
will succeed in reconstructing herself - in raising herself from the ground - in a positive
way by learning through suffering. If that is our expectation, we shall be seriously
disappointed. Whatever sympathy the audience may feel with Hecuba’s motivation in
her treatment of Polymestor, the language of the play is insistent that a deed has been
done, and Hecuba herself insists on the primacy of deeds over words. What she has
done surely affects the way in which we now view her. Thus it is scarcely surprising that
the general consensus among critics is that Hecuba’s prophesied transformation into a
dog is in some ways a reflection of the dehumanization she has suffered during the
action of the tragedy.”!
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James Morwood
IV THEMES
“The play is a staging ground for many familiar Euripidean themes and techniques: the
opposition between virgin and mother, slave and free, Greek and barbarian, public and
private, enemy and friend, male and female, beast and human; the contrapuntal ironies
of shifting roles and relationships that involve forms of doubling, identification, and
exchange among all the characters.”!
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Froma Zeitlin
“Freedom (and slavery) is clearly a major theme of the play. Agamemnon is in
institutional terms the character that enjoys the greatest freedom, but morally he is the
slave of the military mob. Hecuba, in contrast to the king of Mycenae, has no
institutional power, but is prepared to demand that moral right prevail and then to act
herself to vindicate it. But if everyone is a slave, how can Hecuba, who is a slave in the
most literal sense be an effective moral agent? The answer is a nice paradox: those
who are literal slaves with no future can still exert enough physical freedom to vindicate
their moral convictions. Precisely because they are slaves, they have nothing to lose
and therefore no vulgar self-interest to corrupt their morality.” Stuart Lawrence
“Necessity (anagke) in various forms is an important feature of the play. Polyxena
stresses its force, Hecuba tries to make play with it, the chorus refer to it, and the final
words of the play, appropriately enough, are ‘Necessity is harsh’, 1295. There are more
instances of anagke in Hecuba than in any other play by Euripides. Abstract necessity
seems to be a substitute for more anthropomorphic deities in this play.
“At one level, charis might simply mean gratitude, favors exchanged for favors given.
This is the reading that provokes charges of Hecuba’s utter debasement as a woman
who would traffic in sex and abandon her moral standards for the sake of revenge. But
charis is also an erotic term, suitably used for the pleasures of the night. Gratification
and gratitude here coincide in this network of human relations.” !
Froma Zeitlin
“One of the most important contrasts in the play is between Greek and barbarian, a
contrast which coincides with that between dynastic figures like the Trojan queen and
princess and members of a democratically run commonwealth like Odysseus and
Agamemnon. This contrast is exploited not only in explicit speeches such as that of
Odysseus to Hecuba (326f.) but also in the way Greeks, Trojans and Thracians are
portrayed. Around this distinction other political and ethical distinctions group
themselves, so that the contrast invites us to look for a meaning larger than the
accidents of race.”! !
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David Kovacs
“Tarkov is correct in observing the obsessively numerous references to children and
lineage in the play.... He reads the theme of children in terms of what they are
supposed to represent (innocence, hope, and progress) and reduces the moral tensions
and dramatic intricacies of the play into a sentimental homily, a ‘sad lesson’ that teaches
us that in hard and inconsistent times, the continuity of family relations fails to serve as
a measure of ‘constancy and permanence’ or to sustain the idea of ‘ hereditary nobility.’
On the contrary, it seems that ‘the lesson of the play,’ if any, is that men ignore or
destroy those bonds to their peril, a typically tragic pattern.” ! !
Froma Zeitlin
Other prominent themes include fate/chance (tyche), rhetoric and persuasion
(peitho), traditional Greek values of friendship/loyalty (philia), honor (time), glory/
reputation (kleos) and justice/revenge (dike).
V DRAMATIC STRATEGIES
“As we have seen, there are several unusual and significant features; in general it is
noticeably full of lyric, which unleashes a good deal of emotion early in the play. The
musical pattern of the beginning of the play thus runs as follows: anapestic monody by
Hecuba, parodos by chorus in anapests, monody by Hecuba, lyric exchange between
Hecuba and Polyxena and monody by Polyxena.” !
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J. Mossman
“At 273ff. Hecuba makes a formal supplication gesture to Odysseus. She refers to his
supplication of her at Troy, and she makes the same gesture as she says he did,
kneeling, clasping the (right) hand and her garment.... The scene with Agamemnon is in
many respects a mirror-scene to that of Odysseus, and this is marked visually by the
supplication at 752, which employs the same gestures as the earlier one: kneeling and
clasping the right hand and chin. This visual similarity is intended to recall the earlier
scene to the audiences’ mind and thus act as a bridging scene.”!
J. Mossman
“Several scholars have written about Euripidean debates and their internal structure,
and in general it seems that the dramatist the formalities of these contests with some
subtlety. In the first Odysseus, whose counsel prevails, speaks second, as do the
majority of successful speakers in Euripides; but Hecuba, as the character who holds
both our sympathy and attention, has the longer rhesis. Late in the play Agamemnon
stands in the role of a judge, but, as in the first agon (debate), the second speaker
Hecuba will carry the day.! !
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J. Mossman
“The chorus, then play a very important role in articulating and illuminating the action.
The odes are not interchangeable or unconnected with their context like the interludes
of later dramatists. They are also very beautiful poetry, and provide a great deal of the
aesthetic pleasure which, though it can not be said to lighten the grim tone of the
drama, enhances it greatly by providing a lyrical counterpoint to its events. That the
chorus sympathize with Hecuba throughout the play is important, but cannot of itself
imply that Euripides meant us to take the same view: they are not omniscient, though
they can be one factor in the presentation of the play’s moral issues.” J. Mossman
V INTERPRETATIONS
“Like so many Euripidean plays, the tragedy of Hecuba is not the tragedy of an
individual but a group tragedy, its apparently random and disconnected episodes bound
together by a single, overriding idea, forced up in ever more inclusive complexity by the
development of the action. Uniting the Hecuba, underlying Hecuba’s transformation,
and joining persecutors and persecuted in a common tragedy is a bleak logic of political
necessity, a concern that brings the Hecuba close to Trojan Women and Thucydides’
Melian Dialogue.”! !
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William Arrowsmith
“ The Hecabe presents a spectacle of suffering, rage, and revenge, endured and
enacted by women, who, as Euripides realized, suffer first and most from war. So long
as we live in a world all but defined by violence, Euripides’ Hecabe will offer compelling
witness to the courage and solidarity of those who suffer most and a fierce challenge to
the simplistic assurance that suffering is somehow for the better of us all.” R. Meagher
“Hecuba acts in harmony with her retributive morality. But does she act in harmony with
the implicit morality of the play? We have seen that no other character objects to her
treatment of Polymestor. Therefore, as nasty as retribution is, it is much more
acceptable to conventional Greek sensibilities than to ours. Even so, acts of revenge in
Euripides tend to be morally unsettling, and even an ancient audience is surely meant to
find this one so. The play therefore does not offer comfortable moral closure. Hecuba
does what has to be done since no one else will act for her, and she acts out of moral
outrage and a sense of utter loss, performing the final significant act in a life that would
be henceforth meaningless.” !
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Stuart Lawrence
“ For this play is about the bestialization that violence produces. The animal imagery in
not incidental but essential. Violence treats Polyxene as a sacrificial victim; it brings
Polymestor to crawling like an animal; it turns the women to savagery and the queen
into a hellhound. Agamemnon, Cassandra, and Polyxene are all victims of violence.
Only Polyxene rises above the violence, and, as Arrowsmith puts it, ‘her death, futile in
itself, exposes, by the quality of its commitment, the dense ambiguity of the moral
atmosphere for those who cannot die.’ Even she cannot arrest the escalation of the
violence; but once she is removed the degeneracy and degradation steep the scene like
some foully increasing fallout and poison all they touch. It was happening in the Greece
that Euripides knew, and his play was a warning and a protest.”!
John Ferguson
“It would be difficult to exaggerate the blackness of this play, or the horror of the closing
scene, as three doomed protagonists exchange hatred and predictions of death and
degradation. The watchword of Hecuba is ugliness, to aischron. By throwing aside the
heroic, the play grapples directly with evil. Yet evil and pain in themselves are alien to
poetry, since they carry with them the constant threat of grotesquerie, of the ludicrous
that lies always so close to the horrible, or of a lack of proportion, grace, and
measure.... Like the Sophistic itself, the play is both false and valid, empty and futile, yet
filled with a demonic energy that is itself a celebration of the aspirations it mocks. In the
end, Hecuba creates its beauty, not by ennobling what is ordinarily shameful/ugly
(aischron), but of the very elements of the aischron itself.” ! !
Ann Michelini
“Hecuba has been criticized for being persistently and defiantly rhetorical -it was
criticized for being so even in antiquity. Its structure has been condemned as brokenbacked. Its stage effects are deliberate, and sometimes elaborate, variations on the
common patterns of tragedy, and have been seen as lurid travesties of them.... In
fact, Euripides’ Hecuba contains some of Euripides’ strongest writing. It should be
admired for the brilliance and poignancy of its rhetoric, for the subtlety of its exploration
of intellectual themes,and for its masterly evocation of pathos. It is innovatively and
excitingly plotted and carefully structured, and it makes effective use of the visual
resources of the Greek theatre. The chorus’ role is perfectly adapted to the play, and
their odes are moving and powerful. It should stand in the first rank of Euripides’ work.”
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Judith Mossman
“The Trojan women are the survivors of a vanished world of wealth, dynastic power, and
traditional morality, a world where family and personal allegiance were important and
where the gods stood surety for the sanctity of the basic human emotions of pity,
gratitude, and honor. The fall ofd Troy brings these women into sharp conflict with those
whose way of life is the polar opposite of these, and by destroying the city which
upholds these values puts them to the test in the crucible of absolute powerlessness. It
is in the light of this contrast - what we might call the heroic and the non-heroic in the
political dimension - that the action of the play assumes its wider significance, the two
halves of the play cohere, and the anachronistic speeches make their contribution to an
artistic whole.”!
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David Kovacs
“ Like all tragedies, Hecuba is a drama of human relations, involving friend and enemy,
kin and nonkin. Like most, it is structured around the distinctions between the world of
women and the world of men. It goes further, however, in several ways. First, gender
relations are radically polarized in the distribution of power. Second, there is an
increased complexity in the dynamics of these relations. Third, most notably, all human
relations in the play are expressed and determined by the body, whether in contact or
disjuncture, supplication or slaughter, embrace or lament. No other play forces upon us
so insistently the sheer physicality of the self and its component parts: the head, face,
cheek, neck, throat, eyes, breasts and bosom, hands, arms, flanks, knees, flesh and
blood. Our attention is drawn to the body, upright or prone, vigorous or weak, naked or
clothed, free or constrained, alive or dead.”!
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Froma Zeitlin